(LifeSiteNews) – The U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) “explicitly recognizes that doctors do have the authority to prescribe ivermectin to treat COVID,” an attorney for the federal government affirmed this week in a notable retreat from the government’s hostility to the drug.
The Epoch Times reports that the statement from U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) attorney Ashley Cheung Honold came during the course of oral arguments before the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, in a lawsuit brought by three doctors, Paul Marik, Mary Bowden, and Robert Apter, against the government for allegedly interfering with their ability to prescribe ivermectin to COVID-19 patients.
The FDA has publicly urged Americans not to take ivermectin for COVID, in the process emphasizing the drug’s less common use to treat horses to frame its decades of far more common, hundreds of millions of pills prescribed human use as a bizarre and dangerous practice. In fact, ivermectin has long been approved by the FDA for a variety of human ailments and is included in the World Health Organization’s (WHO’S) Model List of Essential Medicines. Like many medications, it has both human and animal applications, but human dosages for human ailments were not controversial until ivermectin started gaining notice in the context of COVID.
You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it. https://t.co/TWb75xYEY4
— U.S. FDA (@US_FDA) August 21, 2021
Catherine Arnett was harassed, jailed, denied access to Mass, and removed from active service with the Marine Corp because she refused to take an abortion-tainted COVID shot.
We MUST demand that the Marine Corps reinstate her and apologize for this cruel treatment of the 25-year-old.
SIGN: Catherine Arnett deserves justice!
Arnett was a faithful and hardworking American Marine serving overseas in Japan. The unvaccinated Lance Corporal was subjected to torrid pressure however by her superiors in standing up for her Catholic beliefs when the COVID jab mandate was implemented.
She objected to taking the shot because she considered it immoral to force someone to receive an abortion-tainted vaccine. The Marines then tried various ways of coercing Arnett to obey, such as harassment and arrest.
SIGN: We MUST stand with Catherine in her fight for justice!
They took her license in May of 2022 for refusing to separate (a term referring to removal from active service). She was restricted to base for 30 days (about 4 and a half weeks) until she had her community outreach access restricted in January 2023.
She challenged her self-professed Catholic Commanding Officer on his views and religious beliefs as he tried to tell Catherine that her religious beliefs were wrong. Because of this, he had her arrested on January 23, 2023 and jailed for 113 days until May 15, 2023.
His specially crafted punishment for Arnett was to keep her away from the daily Mass that she had always attended. She was only able to receive Holy Communion once in the space of 80 days. After 80 days they moved her to California.
June 23, 2023 was Catherine’s last day in the Marines Corp. At 4 am June 24th, they dropped her off at a random gas station with nothing but the clothes on her back, while her personal belongings are being withheld from her in Japan.
SIGN: Catherine Arnett should never have been removed by the Marine Corps
The doctors contend that the agency’s presentation of treating COVID with ivermectin as medically irresponsible has harmed them professionally. Marik and Bowden were both suspended by the hospitals where they practice, and Bowden was subject to investigation by the Washington Medical Commission and Arizona Medical Board. Marik was investigated by the Virginia Board of Medicine, as well.
“The fundamental issue in this case is straightforward,” argued the doctors’ attorney Jared Kelson. “After the FDA approves the human drug for sale, does it then have the authority to interfere with how that drug is used within the doctor-patient relationship? The answer is no.”
Circuit Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod pressed Honold on why public statements such as “stop it” do not rise to the level of a “command,” to which the DOJ attorney claimed the FDA “was simply using these words in the context of a quippy tweet meant to share its informational article,” and that they “don’t prohibit doctors from prescribing ivermectin to treat COVID or for any other purpose.”
While some experts continue to debate the effectiveness of ivermectin for treating COVID, and some studies have indicated it was allegedly not effective, a now large body of accumulated studies has found it to be irrefutably highly effective for treating Covid when given early and with the correct protocol. Positive anecdotal accounts have generated large interest in the Nobel prize-winning medication that has one of the highest safety levels of any medication ever developed. It has been used and studied for far longer than the COVID vaccines. They were developed and released in record time by the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed initiative, meaning that the established drugs’ safety profiles are far better understood than those of the relatively new vaccines, which were rushed and politicized.
A large factor in this controversy has been that the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) that allowed for dispensing of the experimental Covid jabs has been dependent on there allegedly being no effective alternative medication for treating Covid. Thus, as Marik and many other physicians who have successfully been treating Covid patients have charged, most Covid deaths could have been prevented had Ivermectin, Hydroxychloroquine, and other effective protocols not been suppressed to allow the EUAs to stay in place for the jabs.
READ: New peer-reviewed study finds risk of serious side effects to mRNA COVID vaccines
Despite the wealth of existing knowledge about the drugs (as opposed to the evolving nature of COVID conventional wisdom), families across the country have had to go to court to force hospitals to let them try the medications for their loved ones, while doctors have seen their medical licenses threatened and they have been removed from their medical positions for prescribing the exceptionally safe medication.
